I Hate Back-To-School Shopping

I just celebrated 10 years of back-to-school shopping for my kids, and I hate it more every single year. The best $10 I ever spent was to pay a babysitter to do my back-to-school shopping. Most years, though, I end up doing it myself. It is my least favorite chore of all-time. Here's why:

1. It is expensive. This year, I spent $300 for my clan. How can pens, pencils, folders, and glue cost that much? That figure doesn't even include the school supply of "$20″ that is on each of their lists. Yes, apparently that "fee" is a school supply now.

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2. "No, mom, it has to be…" Sometimes I just want to give up. One year the kids needed blue folders and yellow folders. The store only had green and purple. I thought my logic was solid– blue and yellow make green. So, two green folders equals one blue folder and one yellow folder. Am I right? "No, mom, they have to be blue and yellow separately." Grrrrr! Same goes for crayons. "No, mom, it has to be four packs of twelve, not one pack of 48."

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(This is where I want to tell them that when I was a kid we had to make our own crayons. And, we didn't have pencils, or hand sanitizer. We used our dirty fingers to scrawl out our spelling tests on used newspaper.)

3. Why do kids need 30 glue sticks each? Unless the class is making a true-to-size copy of Michelangelo's David out of glue instead of marble, I can't imagine why they need so many. I've pondered this for ten years and have no good answer.

4. Some items are impossible to find. This year it was the graph notebook. I found graph paper, graph paper with holes, and a graph note pad. ("No, mom, it has to be a notebook.) I checked three stores before being told the pharmacy had them. Nope, no luck. The problem with the Holy Grail of school supplies is even after my child got one from a friend, I still feel compelled to search for this graph notebook everywhere. It's a challenge. One I'm failing.

5. It sucks having to talk about back-to-school shopping. What is there to say? Does anyone really want to hear a 40-minute rant about graph notebooks? I hope so, because that is all I'll talk about if you get me in a room with other adults who have endured this same horror. The problem is, nobody really wants to hear about other people's struggles. Everyone wants to vent. So, when it's your turn to complain about the lack of safety scissors, I tune you out. I'm still on Planet Graph Notebook.

6. There is too much competition surrounding back-to-school-shopping. When you're down to the last item on your list and can't find it, that is super frustrating. When your child asks the sales associate at full volume, "Where are the pencil sharpeners" and then five mom-spies all listen in, run to that aisle and take the last few before you can get there, that is even more frustrating. Next year's protocol will be to have the sales associates either whisper or respond in writing. Or, we'll practice our sprints starting in July so we can get there first.

7. Can't the schools buy copy paper and dry erase markers? I bought my own markers when I was a teacher, and I hated it. So, from a teacher's perspective, I can see why kids are asked to buy them. I wear two hats, though. When I'm wearing my mom hat, I think, "NO! I bought them as a teacher, why am I buying them as a parent?" The other illogical piece of this is that there's a budget for each kid to have in iPad, but there isn't room in the budget for copy paper. That makes as much sense as budgeting for a 1967 Corvette and then serving grass and leaves to the kids because there is no money left over for food.

8. Organizing the school supplies is really overwhelming. I didn't go to kindergarten, so I missed the unit on sorting objects. That's my excuse for having trouble dividing up the school supplies between all of the kids once we get home from the store.